The title Aveux non avenus does not lend itself to facile translation. While "Aveux" may be clearly understood as either "avowals" or "confessions," the addition of the phrase "non avenus," which indicates that which has "not happened," renders the formulation opaque. Most English-speaking scholars choose to translate "non avenus" loosely as "disavowed," which contains both "avow" and its negation. This play on words captures the spirit of the title, which references, with the word "confessions," an entire autobiographical tradition while canceling it out in the next breath. The book's cover graphic prepares us visually for the project's critical thrust, creating out of the self-contradicting title a canceling "X"--with the palindrome "NON" reiterated at its crux [fig.26, cover Aveux non avenus]. 19

Golda Goldman, the Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who interviewed Cahun and Moore in the 1920s, translated the book's title more simply: "Denials."20 Certainly "denials" (as in "no, not interested") sums up the way most reputable Paris publishers responded at this time to requests to consider the publication of "women's writing," with its putatively confessional character. But, even more pointedly, "denial" offered a backhanded way of affirming the literary and personal choices that had marginalized Cahun with respect to Paris's vanguard literary society--where she nevertheless sought sympathy.

"There are times," she confessed to Adrienne Monnier, "when I suffer so much from this isolation, of which my nature and all kinds of other circumstances are the cause, that...," her words trailed off.21 Monnier, in whom Cahun had hoped to find an ally, pressed the aspiring author to try her hand at the journal intime. Cahun's response?

You have told me to write a confession because you know only too well that this is currently the only literary task that might seem to me first and foremost realizable, where I feel at ease, permit myself a direct link, contact with the real world, with the facts.22

"Don’t get your hopes up," Cahun added in closing.23 The format that Monnier had recommended must have seemed impossibly burdened with both gendered connotations and testimonial truth-claims. Two years later, in 1928, she presented Monnier with the manuscript of Aveux non avenus, an anti-realist (indeed, surrealistic) critique of autobiography. Would Monnier consider publishing the book? Or would she write the preface? Both requests met with firm and painstakingly explicated denials. "What ever I may do, never could I avoid your objections, too profound, which address the very essence of my temperament," Cahun ultimately conceded to the woman whose recognition she had sought.24 Monnier's rebuff, however anticipated, must nevertheless have stung. Cahun and Moore had, after all, championed Monnier's enterprise, La Maison des Amis des Livres, from its earliest days, borrowing books from the lending library, making purchases, supporting publications, attending the events that transformed the bookstore into an ad hoc cultural center. Cahun paid homage to the spectrum of Monnier's activities in a piece she published in La Gerbe in 1919.25 She was among the first volunteers to staff the English bookshop that Monnier's lover Sylvia Beach opened across the street [fig.27, Sylvia Beach portrait, mount inscribed by Beach reads "photograph by Lucie Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe." (Princeton Libraries, MSS Sylvia Beach Papers, CO 108, Bx 241, F, Photos)].

She knew Monnier well, knew her as an unbending taskmaster, an exacting critic, a trail-blazer. She knew Monnier's taste in literature, was aware of her aversion to surrealism (a movement with which Cahun identified). "Denial," then, not only describes Cahun's response to Monnier's editorial suggestions, and Monnier's (inevitable) rejection of Cahun and her book, it also describes Cahun's psychic disposition with respect to the impossibility of Monnier's complicity, which she had nevertheless obstinately courted. It was not in Monnier's literary world, however, that Cahun and Moore would find their community of peers, but in the arena of politics.

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, where she encountered the surrealist leader André Breton. She (and more rarely Moore) signed, and helped to compose, many of the political tracts generated by Breton and his supporters during the 1930s. In 1934, Cahun published Les Paris sont ouverts (bets are on) a brilliant defense of poetry's political potential, which earned her Breton's grudging respect (despite his homophobia). Cahun participated regularly in surrealist demonstrations, strategy meetings, publications, and exhibitions during this period, while Moore remained active behind the scenes. The puppets and surrealist objects that Cahun (and Moore?) produced and photographed during the 1930s negotiated between the theater of political opposition and the theatre of dreams, the psyche and the revolution, the two poles, in other words, of surrealist practice.

As the surrealist group--and, moreover, the political left in France more generally--divided into antagonistic factions, Cahun sided with Breton. The acts of puppet theater that she staged and photographed at this time dramatize positions consistent with those that she advanced in collective publications such as Dissolution de Contre-Attaque (1936). In one mise-en-scène, for instance, a tiny German officer whose body Cahun had crafted out of the communist newspaper L'Humanité signals the merger of two totalitarian schools of thought, that of Hitler and that of Stalin [fig.28, Poupée I, JHT/1995/42/i].

In retrospect, it is tempting to view these "puppets" as harbingers of the creative acts that Cahun and Moore would stage on the Isle of Jersey during the German Occupation. However, in 1936, the idea of moving to Jersey--not to mention trepidations about the occupation of Paris--may not yet have broken the horizon of their conscious minds.

A year later, though, Cahun and Moore packed up their affairs and moved to St. Brelades, a remote parish on the isolated Channel Island of Jersey. One can only speculate as to their motives. Disillusionment with the political climate in Paris (the outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the violent schisms that divided the left and broke up their circle of friends) undoubtedly influenced the decision to seek a more harmonious environment. But why the Isle of Jersey? They had vacationed on the island and knew that it would offer them a haven where they could consider their options in relative serenity. But this was also true of Le Croisic, in Brittany, which had the advantage of being more convenient to Paris. The Channel Islands, on the other hand, were a world apart, a world in between--not part of the United Kingdom, closer to the Normandy coast, an historic place of piracy and literary exile. Was it the neutrality, the history of sanctuary, the cultural hybridity and political inconsequence that attracted the couple? They had discussed expatriating to Canada--but Jersey, at least, lay close enough to France's shores to permit the maintenance of bonds of affinity and affection. (Henri Michaux, Nadja, Henri Barbier, Breton and Jacqueline Lamba visited them on the island, for instance.)

Not long after Paris was invaded by German military forces in 1940, Jersey suffered the same fate. Cahun and Moore decided to stand their ground, rather than fleeing to England as fully half of the islanders had. In fact, they launched a two-woman anti-nazi propaganda operation, blanketing every part of the island with handmade tracts. Cahun's war memoir describes how she and Moore succeeded in creating the illusion of a large-scale resistance movement. After several years at risk, they were arrested for high crimes of treason and were subjected to arduous interrogation because they refused to reveal the names of their male collaborators. The investigating officers found it impossible to believe that two middle-aged women had conducted such a daring campaign "all alone." "They were forced, at the end of the day, to condemn us without believing in our existence," Cahun concluded.26 This tour-de-force performance, under fire, represents the end-logic of the couple's career of theatrics: from the photo play of two defiant lovers, to collective acts of cultural subversion, to the (fragile) dream of political community, to acting as one (acting as if they were many) in resistance to military domination.

When I look at Moore's pictures of Cahun [figs.29-30, JHT/1995/31/l, JHT/1995/31/k, JHT/1995/16/v, and JHT/1995/31/m]

taken just after the liberation, when the two returned to their home to dance along the fortifications that the German's had built in their garden, a phrase from Aveux non avenus springs to mind: "Victorious! Sometimes victorious over the most atrocious inhibitions, a last-minute maneuver corrects a shadow, an imprudent gesture--and beauty is reborn."27 I think, too, of the enigmatic pictures that Moore later took of another wall, at the end of a smaller garden, looking out over the same sea from the modest house that she purchased for herself after Cahun's death. There I see a naked stage, haunted by the absent subject of Moore's photographs, life-long object of her devotion and desire [fig. 33, the empty garden wall viewed from Moore's backyard, JHT, print from uncatalogued negatives].